Category: blogging

This One’s For Heather: Podcasts and Mashups

This one’s for Heather. Max and I went to dinner with my mom, brother and sister last night and we ended up talking about mashups and podcasts. Heather wanted me to send her some links, but I’d hate to go through all that effort only to repeat it when someone else asks me. So, this post will get e-mailed around to folks (hi, folks) when they ask me what a mashup or a podcast is or how they can get some.\

<dl>
<dt>mashup</dt>
<dd>Taking any musical work or works and turning them into something else. This isn’t a cover, which is someone performing a song. It’s usually taking the recorded version of the song and combining it with other recorded elements (usually other songs… you know, mashing them up!).</dd>
<dt>podcast</dt>
<dd>Recording an audio file and posting it to a website. I know, it’s more than that, but that’s it, really. The real hook to podcasting is syndicating those audio files and producing them on a semi-regular basis so people can use their feed reader of choice to download them automatically to their iPod (hence “pod”casting) or to their music player of choice.</dd>
</dl>
\
I’ve only recently gotten into listening to podcasts, and have just a couple favorites:

# Radio Clash: This is first for good reason. Tim puts together a fun show, with just the right balance of talk and music. He picks the best mashups out there and throws them together with interesting conversation about what’s going on in his world. Good stuff. Show 38 (the most recent) isn’t a good representation of a “normal” show, so you might want to start with Show 37

# Coverville: Not mashups, but this guy is funny, and he picks some hilarious covers to play. Covers are another secret passion of mine. It all started in Tucson listening to KXCI (the best radio station ever) and hearing Social Distortion‘s cover of Ring of Fire followed by an accordian-laden cover of the same. I was hooked.

# Odeo: They don’t make ’em, but they’re the easiest way I’ve found so far to find ’em and download ’em.\
As for mashups, there are a few folks who produce world-class stuff (at least that I’ve found). Here are my faves:

  • The Kleptones – A Night At The Hip-Hopera is probably my all-time favorite mashup. I can listen to it for hours and hours.
  • Pheugoo: Some really good techno mashups, my favorites being La Naughty Femme, Dip It Joe and Roses for Lindy.
  • DJ BC (link not working at the moment): dj BC and The Beastles is priceless. He mashed Meet The Beatles with The Beastie Boys and it’s magical.
  • Pop Razors: They’ve got some stinkers, but Climbin’ Deeper is unbelievable. You will shake much booty.\
    Of course, the music industry hates mashups and it’s not quite sure what to do with podcasts. But, they hated the CD at first too, and same folks thought that the VCR would kill them. They don’t have a very good track record with being right, do they?\
    Enjoy ’em while you can!

The New My AOL: Feeds Are Cool

I don’t normally talk about work, but I’m making an exception because this one was a lot of fun. It’s officially in beta now, and I can talk about it. Yay!! The new My AOL launched its first beta today, and I worked on it! I got to play with everyone’s favorite new javascript toy: XMLHTTPRequest, and did most of the CSS and a good deal of the markup. It was a fun project to spend a couple weeks on, and there’s a lot of potential for cool stuff with it.\
It is still very beta (in the traditional sense of the word). It’s a little slow in Safari for some reason that we haven’t been able to track down, and there’s a really funny jumping icon thing in Firefox that, again, we haven’t been able to figure out (it jumps the exact width of a scrollbar, but no scrollbar shows up, so it’s double-weird).\
Play around with it, try adding your own feed, and see how it goes. There are a couple odd things about how it chooses which feeds to grab, and which RSS fields to display (for example, if you have both summary and content:encoded, it will only use summary), and if you have multiple feeds in your HTML, it will choose the first if they all have the same link. Hey, it’s a beta.\
There’s lots of cool stuff coming in subsequent releases, so stay tuned!

Upgrading to Betaness

I’ve upgraded almost all the blogs in the Lawver Blogging Network (didn’t know I had one of those, did you) to the new beta version of Movable Type. So far, it’s awesome. New interface, especially for plugins. The new icons are much nicer than the old ones, and the interface seems a lot snappier. I like that you can do almost anything to one of your blogs from the main screen, and well, it’s just better, OK?\
The only problem so far is that MarsEdit is saying I have a bad password, when I know it isn’t. Not sure what that’s about, but I’m sure it will get fixed shortly. Ok, there’s another problem too: The FlickrPhotoset plugin no longer works, which is sad, because I love that plugin. Now, I’ll have to start using GetXML to get my list of photosets too (that’s how I get the recent photos).\
I’d been flirting with WordPress for a project at work, and I just hit a brick wall. It’s not that WordPress is bad. It’s not. It’s very good, but you have to know too much PHP in order to tweak it. So, it’s back to MT, and talking folks into buying a license for it.\
The power of MT comes not from its technology, but from the template system. I love the fact that I’m not locked into a programming language to use it. I can have my templates spit out PHP, Tcl, or anything else. With most of the other blogging gigs out there, you’re stuck with PHP whether you like it or not (and I’m ambivalent at the moment… I never have enough time to spend getting to know it).\
If you see anything funky, please let me know.\
Update – A Couple Tips:

  • If you created a new user for yourself and deleted Melody when you installed, you’ll need to go into the database and tweak your record in mt_author. Set the author_is_superuser field to 1 and update that row.
  • If you use something like MarsEdit to post to your blog, you’ll need to edit your user and add the xml-rpc password. You can do this by clicking your user name at the top right corner of the regular Movable Type admin screen.
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Think It Through

Before Jen started blogging here, every post was written by me (or, in one or two cases when Brian was born, by Heather). I was talking to someone yesterday about Jen posting here, and they were surprised. This is someone who reads this site through a feed reader… and then it clicked. Oops.\
I didn’t think it through. Now we’ve got multiple authors here. I compensated for this on the main site by making our posts different colors (Jen’s are orange, mine are blue). In the feed, I wouldn’t do that, and honestly didn’t think about it. So, as of this post, you should get the right author of each post in the feed, so you can see who the author is. If that doesn’t work, let me know (sorry if it makes all the posts in the feed unread, but it had to happen sooner or later).

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Jen Joins The Fun

Now that I’ve kind of got Jen to join the fun here, I figured I needed to find a way to show when a post was written by Jen, and one that was written by me. I’ve always had the “posted by Kevin” thing at the bottom, but that’s at the bottom. So, I’ve added a class to the entry body, so posts by Jen are orange, and posts by me are blue. I may change that, and do it in a less-obtrusive way (I don’t really like background colors other than white for text, but I’m going to try this out for a little while).\
In other news, avoid malaria pills and the typhoid oral vaccine if you can. I don’t know which one is to blame (and it could be something else entirely), but I’m not feeling so hot at the moment. I’ll spare you the details.

Bookmark Now!

I don’t pretend that I’m a writer, and that’s probably a good thing. Apparently, being a writer is both hard work, and the easiest thing in the world. I just finished Kevin Smokler’s new book, Bookmark Now. A collection of essays about reading and writing in the internet age, it’s a fascinating look into the minds of writers, an interesting examination of modern publishing, and a big sloppy wet kiss to the internet from young(ish) writers from all over.\
There are some brilliant essays here, and the entire book presents an overriding theme of hope for writing, reading, and all the stuff in the middle. My personal favorites were the pieces by Dan Kennedy, Adam Johnson and Kelley Eskridge and Nicola Griffith (they wrote the crown jewel of that section). They were all from the same section of the book: The Writing Life. Each of them gave a little glimpse into the process of a writer, not only how they see the world, but how they attack writing, how they deal with setbacks and criticism.\
As someone who’s always toying with the idea of writing a book, this book was a good chunk of inspiration to put towards that goal. If you’re at all interested in reading or writing, you’ll get a kick out of Bookmark Now.

What I’ve Been Up To

I’ve totally redone the categories, so they’re more tag-like. I’m also slowly going through all the posts I did while I was on Blogger, over 600 of them, and moving them to their appropriate categories. It’s been fun going back and looking at some of the stuff I wrote a few years ago. It’s a lot of fun.\
Tonight, I got to my posts around September 11th, now in a new category called terrorism that’s slowly growing. I expect the memories to come flooding back when I get to the sniper attacks here in DC. For us, they were almost worse than September 11th. It went on longer, and had the whole area wracked with fear for so long – all at the same time the anthrax scare happened. All of it local, all of it random, all of it could strike anyone at anytime.\
Keep an eye on the categories. They’ll keep moving around, and I’ll be redesigning the archives page in the near future.