Cocktail Confessions

I’m very excited to present this episode to you all.  I was finally able to get my childhood friend Brian Liles over for my first guest podcast, and hopefully we’ll do plenty more together in the future.  It was actually pretty easy to accomplish with just one microphone and turned out better than I anticipated.

So, here’s the setup…A few of my neighbors (Chip Beef & Ryan) and Brian went out earlier in the day to have a mess of hot wings and beer over at Wingstop.  Between the four of us we ate approx. 100 buffalo wings of various degrees of hotness (including the habenero induced ‘Atomic’) and went through at least five pitchers of beer.  Afterwards, Brian came over to my place, we cracked us some 22oz russian beers called ‘Baltika #3 ‘(4.8%), and sat down for this very podcast.

Brian has his own site dedicated to his love for offroading and his FJ Cruiser.  Go visit him at Brians4x4adventrues.com or click on the link in the right margin under my favorite links.  As I post this episode, Brian is actually on another roadtrip in Canada and he’s been updating his pages as well (finally).  You can see some gorgeous photos over there, but anyway, on to my show:

Oh, and the bumper music today is ‘Back in the Saddle Again’ by Gene Autry, so dig it!!

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Added yet another Plug-in, Sociable v3.3.1,  that lets you customize a an array of social bookmarking sites at the end of each post.  Out of the 99 available social sites, I chose the main ones that are of the most relevance for most blogging efforts.

Easy install and configuration.  Using all default settings, no custom images or CSS stylistic theme mods.

So if you like a particular post/entry you see here and want to share on a social networking site, then by all means, just click the appropriate chiclet at the bottom of the post.  Thanks!

Edit: Hmm…Well, it’s working and displaying in ‘preview’ mode, but doesn’t seem active in ‘live’ modes.  Will check out tomorrow.  Maybe a synchronization issue with WordPress & GoDaddy hosting?

Edit #2 (10:00pm):  Well, it looks like it’s now working.  Seems to be a true/false error condition in the ‘enclosure’ section of cutsom settings.  Figured that out by accident.

Just a quick cleanup and addition.

Added a new link: The Daily Woof, a blog I also author and maintain over at Blogger.com.  I’m an animal lover, especially dogs, so I have a news website dedicated to all things canine.  There are product reviews, interviews, news stories from around the world, poems, pictures, and a bit humor as well.  Even though it’s called The ‘Daily’ Woof, sometimes it’s hard for me to always update it on a regular basis.  Anyway, if you like dogs or know someone who does, send them over there and spread the word.  No such bad thing as not enough word of mouth.

Added a banner link (right sidebar) to Podcastfaq.com, a fairly easily navigatable site to help answer basic Podcasting questions.  Instructs users on the basics, including how to find other podcasts, how to promote your podcast, legal issues you may encounter, a glossary on common terms and podcasting jargon, and a portal to get to the Blubrry support forums.  It has some useful information for newbies, and some decent source links, but again, a high level overview on podcasting.

Added ‘Podcast’ page at the top navigation toolbar.  Not only will individual podcasts be published in entries here, but I’ll treat that page as a podcast archive repository, where download links will be available, in order, of all my episodes.

Returned ‘WordPress for Dummies’ back to Borders yesterday.  No questions asked.  Sadly there seems to be quite a deficit on really good step-by-step, hands-on instructional books on both podcasting and WordPress.  Go ahead, scan Amazon.com and tell me I’m lying.  The ‘few’ books you can find are somewhat pricey, and really don’t rate well.  The most promising one I could find was Podcast Solution, 2nd ed. by Dan Klass and Michael Geoghagan, but not sure I’ll get it.  In addition to audio podcasting, it devotes quite a bit to video casting as well.  Although it is a second edition, the publish date was November of 2007, so already it’s more than a year and a half behind the current time and technology.

Audtest01.mp3

Today I’ve been playing a bit with built in players. Why? Well, because in all honesty they look pretty darn cool. But there’s where the coolness factor ends.

Like quite a few things I’ve been discovering the last week or so, many supposedly‘seamless’ plug-ins for WordPress were all designed for earlier incarnations of the main software.  Most plug-ins were built for or prior to WP v2.5 and many haven’t been updated since.  You’d think that many of these things would be backward compatible, or the original authors/coders would hop right in there when a new WP release goes from beta to alpha and then gold stage, but apparently not.  Ah, the woes of freeware.

Again, I am currently running WP v2.7.6 and everyday I login to tweak this or that, I see a glaring banner beckoning me to upgrade to the newest v2.8.  Uh-uh…not gonna happen anytime soon.  There’s too many issues on the forum sites with v2.8 since it’s release about a week ago.  Heck, I can’t even get stuff working with v2.7, and as I said, so many plug-ins for earlier versions have yet to be updated.

Long story short, I was able to install Audio-player 2.06b that gives this cool little flash player for MP3 files embedded in posts, but not all the coding is working correctly.  I can’t add a download link for those that want to save my audio files to a storage device without it automatically installing the flash player and the

enclosures are not working correctly.  I should be able to add a the following code:

and the player image should show up like the one above…but it’s not, and I don’t know why….yet.  And believe me I spent about an hour trying various syntax configurations to no avail.

So, I’m not sure if I’ll keep this player or not.  If I can’t find solution, I may try another popular ‘free’ plug-in player.  There are a few others ones that cost a little cabbage, (i.e. $$), but not sure if I’m going to go that route.

The visitor counter, while working, is not capturing accurate data either.  Every time I edited this post to work on the streaming audio player and re-publish, it counts my visit to test as a ‘new’ visit, so I am accidentally yet artificially inflating my own visitor count.  I need to find one that track ‘unique’ visits on a daily basis that doesn’t count me.

Also added a new category: ‘Techno babble’ which more or less will be the geek posts like this one…which has nothing to do with cocktails, confessions, or anything fun.  Oh, and a new ‘WTF’ category as well….well, you can decipher what that means and what it is for.

Finally added a few links as well, one to Adam Corolla and one called ‘An Inconvenient Tumor’.  Enjoy

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