Blodget’s Blog

Odeo.com supplies a very nice Flash player for podcasts. I linked to all my Zipboingwow podcast recordings and created a podcast on Odeo. This is the player they provide for embedding in your blog or website. I was an early adopter of podcasting. These were done two years ago in 2004.

I like the way the player displays pictures for each recording and that when you click the picture it takes you to that recording’s page. Here’s a link to the podcast on Odeo.com and here’s a link to my original podcast page on Zipboingwow.com.

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Today I made a how-to video about using a Flickr photo in a blog post. This is really the easiest way to add a photo to a message. This type of movie is called a screencast because you capture what you do on your computer’s screen. I used SnapZ Pro to capture a movie of what I was doing in Flickr on my MacBook. I also used Omni Dazzle to circle things on the screen as I made the recording. I recorded my voice using the MacBook’s built-in microphone. I saved the movie using the Animation codec at 15 fps. I then Imported the movie to iMovie and added a title and closing credit and some sound effects and transitions. I exported the movie as an avi file and then converted the avi to flv using ffmpegX. I then uploaded everything to my blodget.net server and used the Wimpy WASP player to show the flv file on a web page. The final flv movie is about 4 minutes long and is about 8.3 Mb. See Flickr Photos in Your Blog.

A very special thank you to Don McAllister and his wonderful Screencastsonline.com website for information on how to produce a screencast including links to all the tools he uses. Be sure to see his Behind the Scenes screencast.

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I just discovered Imagewell. It’s a great little free image editor and ftp client for the Mac. Just drag and drop your image file to Imagewell and you can resize it, rotate it, crop it, add a caption, change the filename, add a drop shadow if you want and upload it to your web space. Imagewell will even copy the URL to the clipboard so you can paste it into your blog post like I did here.

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You can embed a nice mp3 player using Google’s on your own page. Just use the iframe tag and add your own URL to the mp3 file.

Here’s the code:

<iframe id="musicPlayer" style="border: 1px solid #aaaaaa; width: 350px; height: 25px"
src="http://mail.google.com/mail/html/audio.swf?audioUrl=
http://www.yourwebsite/yourmp3file.mp3"></iframe>

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I just installed the advanced- wysiwyg plug-in and I am now using it for the first time to write a post. The toolbar has lots of new options and formatting features. I’m curious to see how the image insert features work.

I just went to my Flickr pictures and picked out this daisy. I pasted the URL into the image insert field and chose align left and it worked. Not bad. I also clicked on the image and then clicked the link icon to see if I can set a link for the image. I think it worked.

Here’s where I found the plug-in. Wow, that was cool. The link feature now let’s me choose whether to open the link in the same window or a new one.

I hate to push this too far before publishing the post but I just have to try switching to HTML view and back and then try spell checking. Wish me luck. Cool it all works!

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Wow! I just installed Vanilla which is a free open source discussion forum. I’m impressed. It was very easy to install and customize. I downloaded a truck load of add-ons to make it one sweet forum. I can now add an announcement at the top of the forum and I added a members page tab. You can add attachments to messages and comments and if you attach an image file it shows up in the message. When you compose messages, you can use plain text or html. You can even embed videos or other media using the object, embed, or iframe tags. I also added a spell checker and the ability to add smileys. But wait, that’s not all. Just about everything has an RSS feed so you can track new comments or even searches! Everything is customizable with CSS or you can adopt a ready made style.

I’ve added a link to the discussion in the blog’s main navigation bar. See it up there? But why not just click here.

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Today I added the “Subscribe by Email” feature to my sidebar. (See it over there on the right)? This makes it easy for people who haven’t yet seen the light about using RSS and aggregators to stay up-to-date with what’s new on my blog. Just type in your email address and click the “Subscribe Me!” button and, Kahbing, you’ll get an email message every time I add a new post. You’ll actually see the post in the email message with pictures and everything. This free service is provided by the good folks at FeedBlitz.com. Check ‘em out.

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