Cocktail Confessions

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Being the somewhat anal retentive person that I am, I hate unsolved mysteries….especially those that were caused by me that affects something I had worked on and the summation of the individual parts don’t match the outcome. 

Call it a little OCD on my part, but I really can’t rest when I know the answer is right there in front of me, but I just can’t see it.  I’ve always been like that, trying to figure out puzzles and riddles, or putting something back together that I took apart and it just won’t fit together exactly right.  I’ll comb wiki’s, faq’s, user notes, etc., to decipher were I turned right when I should have turned left.

So as noted earlier, I had discovered that my FeedBurner (upper right hand corner of my Blog) wasn’t updating correctly and I narrowed it down to something that had changed over the last 4 posts.  After meticolously combing over as many various avenues I could think of (and sometimes repeating them 2, 3, 4+ time just to make sure) which all seemed to have a positive outcome, I sat there scratching my head for a while.

As a last ditch effort, I went line by line (in HTML) over the last few posts, and sure enough, about two-thirds through one of them, I found a suspicious tag.  On the surface it looked innocent enough, a ‘span’ tag that was opened and closed properly by all account, but basically served no real purpose in the place that it resided.  It just didn’t belong if it isn’t really encapsulating anything, so I took it out…and voila….post update and publish and FeedBurner was back up.

It took me quite a few hours to find it, but at least it allowed me to clean up some other coding as well, and now I’m back on track.  Now that I restored it, my mind can rest, and all is right withing my little universe.

Before I get to the site updates, here’s a but that’s going on:

The step-daughter has moved into our house.  At 17 years of age it has been somewhat of an adjustment to undertake and a lot of people are giving us advice.  However, all the advice in the world cannot change the attitude of someone who doesn’t care about school.  Overall, she’s a good kid: she’s polite to neighbors and friends, she doesn’t drink or smoke or do any drugs that we are aware of, no tattoo’s, no errant piercings, no foul mouth.  She just doesn’t do her school work and likes to ditch which has caused her to slip behind….far behind everyone else her age.  And in California where our state is ranked pretty low to begin with in education…..well, as the guidance counselor recently told us….she’s setting herself up for a long life of retail employment.  Sigh.

As far as my diet goes that I self imposed on myself last Sunday, it’s been going ‘okay’.  So far, I only broke down last night when I got home from work and had one Bud Light, otherwise I’ve been drinking water.  I’ve had a few cookies here and there, but overall, my portion sizes have been reduced (although I am a bit hungry and have a mild headache…more so due to my allergies I figure than not enough food), and I’ve been eating a bit healthier.  I could and should even alter my diet a bit more and eat healthier foods (salads, veggies, etc) and need to start some additional exercise.  I had planned on doing some exercise this past week when I get home, but I just haven’t.  No real excuse. I just haven’t.

Halloween is tomorrow, and quite honestly I just don’t care.  I have a costume…more so because my wife wants us to go to a party…but I have no real desire to dress up.  I’m sure I’ll have fun at the party, but I know the temptation of too much drinking may be a factor.  I went to the same party last year, drank a lot, and fell on my ass where I believe I fractures my tail bone.  No joke.  I also had a mild hangover as well…something I’d like to avoid this year.

I have a podcast with my grandfather that I need to complete editing so I can post, and I hope I can do a few recordings this next week as well and supply a bit more content here.

Feedburner: I noticed the other day my regular Feedburner was no longer updating itself correctly and I’m not 100% sure why.  I haven’t made any changes at all to the FeedBurner settings, and after spending quite sometime looking at the various settings pages, account, and some basic troubleshooting it appears it all boils down to possibly a missin “/meta” tag somwhere.  After pinging and validating my pages and getting the “congratulations” response, some further digging revealed that FeedBurner is conflicting with itself somewhere else.  A search of the FAQ stated that this can indeed happen when you copy and paste from MS Office applications like Word or Excel.  Well, I do know I had done some recent cut and paste work from Word and unless I scan line by line the HTML code for the last few posts for a possible errant tag (which I may or may not find), it may or may not fix the issue.  Bums me out since I think WordPress should be smart and compliant enough with Word to not insert additional XML tags, but apparantly not.  Hopefully this will eventually correct itself in the future when I post enough new content to bury the old stuff way down.  So let this be a little knoweldge to you: WordPress, FeedBurner, and MS Word don’t play well with each other.

Site notes:

• BluBerry Power Press updated to v1.0.3.  I think I may try the full service soon as my podcasts aren’t showing up yet on Zune Marketplace and I don’t know why.
• Sociable upgraded to v3.5.2.  No real change for me as I didn’t change my options.
• The Hacker’s Diet – installed v0.9.8b.  This is a plugin behind the scenes in which I should be updating my weight.  You won’t see anything unless I take a snapshot and post it as a picture in a regular post.
• Count Per Day – Updated to v2.4.2 and I use this again behind the scenes.  Traffic monitor.
• WordPress – Still using v2.7.1 although v2.8.5 is available.  I’m a little hesitant to upgrade.  I’m sure it’ll be fine for the most part, but there is always some hidden thing that gets screwed up.

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.

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I have just spent the last hour or so signing up and tinkering with Feedburner.  You should see the appropriate RSS chicklet banner now at the top of the sidebar to the right.  It should rotate the latest 5 posts for those that are just taking a gander.

Feedburner itself just relocated over to Google, and thus you need a Google account to activate Feedburner and everything that goes with it.  While it is currently active now on this site, I still need to make some additional configuration changes, such as adding personal artwork so when my podcasts eventually show up on iTunes, or other pod catching services that support pictures, my podcasts will have a little flair.  I already know the picture I’m gonna use, but it’s stowed on another PC right now, and I’ll have to upload it to my WP server anyway for it to show up.

Since I just activated it less than an hour ago, so it may take a few extra hours before I start catching statistics and data collection for analyzing.  This may sound a little boring to you, and in all honesty, it may end up being a bit boring for me in the long run as well, so I’ll definitely have a drink when I occasionally glance how many of you aren’t that interested in anything I have to say or write about.

So far, everything I have done on this site I have taught myself from reading various forums, wiki’s, and other Internet articles, solely by trial and error.  I feel like I’m pretty close to actually starting the real podcasting I had previously intended to do from the get go.  It’s been a bit slow on the creativity end as I am using more of my techie side (not the happy fun, go-lucky side) to get this up and running.

I also added some option to help share posts to Digg, Facebook, Vinenews, Technorati, Stumble It, and a few others too.  So we’ll see if those kick in or not.

I may even do a dry run ‘break the ice’ podcast tonight.  You know, get the opening down, introduce a drink, tell a story or two and discuss the future format of the show.  I’d like to shoot for about 20-30 minutes for my initial cast, and of course there is the editing again back in Audacity.  So while I may indeed record tonight, it may be a day or two before I actually post.

I want to post a picture of my ad-hoc studio as well (i.e. my spare bedroom where my PC and podcasting kit is located), and also do a quick write up on my Behringer mixing board, microphone, and packaged software as well.