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Howto Choose a Mac Voice Recorder for Podcasting September 19, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Podcasts, HowTo, Reviews , add a comment

Every so often, I will get something that is mass-emailed to hundreds of people that I’m sure I can provide a very deep and useful answer to. Today’s challenge is a Mac-compatible voice recorder that can record phone calls, but be flexible enough to handle recording interviews that will later be the basis for print work AND apparently for possible release as a podcast. Yikes! That is a very flexible recorder! Therefore, my options were fairly narrowed-down. Here was my response:

You mean physically connects to the phone? Is it important to do it on an actual handset?

For example, I would use Skype and eCamm Call Recorder. I use these applications for recording my own podcasts, and I have never looked back. There are also solutions that will let you plug straight into GarageBand if that’s your editing program.

This is exactly the setup I used to record this interview:
Blogging Fringe Interview with Poofy Du Vey (Courtney Cunningham)

Using Skype to call another Skype account is free, and making calls to land-line phones or cell phones is handled via a flat-rate, and international calls are just a few pennies per minute.

If you use skype, you can buy any USB headset with a microphone (I recommend the ones that use USB over other solutions, because you’re using a Mac).

Plantronics Foldable USB Stereo Headset
This headset even comes with a separate (replacable) USB audio device – this is the most flexible, so you can use the headphones as normal headphones or through the USB audio port.

Olympus TP-7 Telephone Recording Device
For recording from a physical phone instead of over VOIP, this product seemed to get a lot of good reviews on Amazon. I’ve never used on myself.

I think the basic Idea is that you put this in your ear and then hold the phone up to that ear – it’s just a small microphone that plugs in to whatever recorder.

Griffin iTalk Pro – Microphone
An extremely simple option if you have an iPod is a voice recording accessory built for iPods, like a Griffin. Most of these have an input jack for an external microphone in them, on top of a mono or stereo mic. Just make sure they are compatible with your version of iPod – 3g, 4g, 5g, Nano, Touch, etc.

Edirol R-09HR High-Resolution WAVE/MP3 Recorder
If you want to go for the big guns, something like an Edirol is made for super-professional recordings, has built in microphones, accepts line-in and a whole bunch of great features – and it records to SD or SDHC cards – completely Mac-compatible. You’ll see a lot of folks recording to a Marantz, but unless you need phantom power, that’s just too much.

Hope this helps. If not, I’d be happy to have a deeper discussion.

If you’re looking for more podcasting help, I MUST recommend the BlogOrlando unconference coming up next weekend. Saturday, Sept 27th at Rollins College. FREE. There will be some really amazing speakers and discussions there.

New Drupal Tutorials June 17, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Site News, HowTo, Drupal, Teaching, open source, Programming , add a comment

Yes, I have yet another blog: this one is all about Drupal. Right now there are exactly 4 posts, but two of them came this week, so there may be an upturn in the posting over there. If anybody out there wants to write some tutorials, I’d be open to that.

The first howto was sort of “scratching an itch”. I got really tired of manually downloading, unzipping, uploading and activating modules when it was time to install a new Drupal site or update an existing one, so I came up with a workflow that gets it all done in record time: Using AWK to Download and Unpack Drupal Modules

The second one was a question delivered to me via chat: How to create a “related pages” block in Drupal 6, but we can’t find any useful modules and my personal recommendation, Panels, is not ported to version 6 yet. Therefore, with some Arguments magic, I bring you (now, new and improved, with 15 screenshots!): Using Views 2 and Drupal 6 to Create a Related Pages Block

In other Drupal news, the Florida Drupal User’s Group is having our 3rd meeting this weekend, June 21st, at the behest of MindComet in Maitland. I’ll be giving a talk about CCK (the Content Construction Kit), specifically using it with Drupal 6, and Mr. Mike Anello will be giving a talk on Views. The whole thing lasts about 4 hours - from 1 to 5 PM. The first two meetings were absolutely worth it, so I highly recommend coming down to check it out, if only for a shorter portion of the marathon.

The next stage for this Drupal Easy project is to build out some wiki pages that outline key Drupal concepts and relate them to each other, wiki-style. It’s something folks have been asking me for ever since the move to Bonnier and the “Drupal Expert” label, so I’m going to see if I can deliver. If that all goes well, there just might be a print version up for sale at LuLu.com as well. No promises, but that’s the plan.

P.S. Not that I want to brag, but Angie and Nate from Lullabot are coming to Orlando this week to train the staff at Bonnier in the use of Drupal. This is the only public mention I’ve made in quite some time, but I’m pretty damn excited to meet the gurus.

What every small town local bookstore should do April 1, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Markteting, HowTo, Video, Film, Shopping, Trends, Books, Travel, Contributors, OrlandoScene, Teaching, open source, Branding, Storytelling, Love , 2 comments

I jsut finished reading Rent Girl by Michelle Tea. It’s a neat little book - half novella and half graphic novel. There are some beautiful illustrations by Laurenn McCubbin in there that were a big reason for my picking up the book in the first place - it just drew you right in, you wanted to know what was up with this young girl from Boston and why she was into being a hooker in the first place - and the back of the book says something about her quitting, but still needing to pay the bills? I’m there.

However Michelle Tea and this book are not the subject of this blog. At least, not directly.

I picked up this indy book at an indy book shop - I was on vacation, visiting Tempe, Arizona, walking to Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods, hiking the Grand Canyon, getting yummy sandwiches from the co-op and drinking local beer. And next to the Trader Joe’s in the adobe-colored shopping center (really, they all were) was this little book store, Changing Hands.

Wait YUMMY!

Changing Hands Bookstore, Tempe Arizona, corner of McClintock and Guadalupe. There was a café, I think, and there was a section up front with fun games - the kinds of stuff you’d see on the bookshelves of Barnes and Noble next year once they hit critical mass. Like all indy book shops, there was a table near the customer service desk with eye-catching books, new arrivals, and the ever-present signed-or-to-be-signed books. And here was Rent Girl. I had spent my time there checking out art books - graphic novels, collections of illustrations, and a couple of re-printed sketchbooks. I always love looking at stuff like that, but I don’t ever know what I would do with it. Then there was this illustrated storybook, but with naked girls and lesbianism and drug dealing.

I only read a few pages on the plane, it was too naughty. I actually couldn’t wrap my head around this book until recently, somehow I feel that by absorbing some women’s media I can try to understand the industry a bit better - things aimed at guys are too easy to understand, low hanging fruit - women’s music, film and books are another beast.

But I digress. I want to plant a seed at Changing Hands in Tempe and Urban Think in Orlando and the Bookmine in Jacksonville, and all the other places where you feel proud buying a naughty graphic novel. This advice isn’t exactly ground-shaking, but I think it makes sense:

Every small town book shop should:

  1. Print their own books.
  2. Teach classes about how to print your own books.
  3. Sell said hand-made and self-published books.
  4. Sell books by local authors on the internet.
  5. Show and sell art on the walls.
  6. Have free and open wi-fi.
  7. Record video/audio podcasts with visiting authors.
  8. Have a space in-store and online for customers to have a conversation, either about books or what happened on last night’s LOST.
  9. Be a place where you want to come to read a book.
  10. Be a place where you would hang out with your friends.
  11. Be the first place you want to visit when you get off of work.
  12. Have space for local groups to hold meetings.

In London I saw a store that only sells Chess and Bridge supplies. They’ve got the largest selection of that stuff you’ve ever seen - no big box store could compete. And on the same block is a store that only sells Flutes. I’m told there’s a store on the other side of the river that only sells French Horns. Granted, in a big city there is a need for places that specialized, but I think even a small town book store can take some tips from these places.

All Flutes Plus Villandry

I saw another place that was a grocery, bookstore, gift shop and restaurant all in one. They wouldn’t let me take pictures in there, it was so unique. They press their own olive oil.

In a certain way, Stardust Video & Coffee here in Orlando has achieved so much of what’s on my list, but the utility of the store, renting movies, was not lucrative enough for them, so they opened up to being more cafe-and-performance-space than video rental space. They’ve recently added a second stage with a strict “no dry-humping” policy, and they also sell hard liquor in addition to their amazing selection of beers, decent wine, tea, coffee, baked goods and original food.

I suppose if there was a local printer, they could achieve something similar without needing to do the actual printing themselves, but I guess that’s part of the point of the bookstore, yes?

As a “video and coffee” establishment, I don’t see where Stardust is the last word on video other than the selection, but I always felt like I wasn’t smart enough to rent there, that the right to rent a film was reserved for someone with a more cultured taste than I. However, the Thursday night Broken Speech Poetry Slam or the local rock shows they have are completely accessible, and I’ve played drums on stage at Stardust many times. Maybe that’s just partly attributed to my training as a musician, but why do I feel I’m below the film?

I guess I’m trying to encourage these book shops to become the Third Place that we are all craving here in Orlando right now. In the land of corporate coffee, the local coffee shop has evolved, mostly in order to survive. I think the local bookstore has a few more steps to take before they’re all grown up.

Which bookstores have you noticed fitting into their niche?

…continued…

This is an old meme I found via Tara Hunt and Pinko Marketing. I’ve been trying to describe local media (or at least the goals of the media I’ve been trying to produce) and what’s supposed to be for sale at Petentials and similar sites. The point isn’t to sell 24,000 of an item priced $1 but 1,000 of an item priced $24, let’s say.

Boutique (from my mac dictionary): French, literally ‘small shop,’ via Latin from Greek apothēkē ‘storehouse.’ Compare with bodega .

Some people are getting my reference to boutique mixed up with luxury brands. Personally, I wouldn’t be caught dead with Louis Vuitton bag and I’m sure most Boutiquers wouldn’t be either. The difference, as the diagram suggests (and there are many more differences than I quickly plotted in this image) is the motivations for buying. I said, “Bought for connection” because, as Sanford commented in the previous posts comment section:

“People go out of their way to purchase certain goods - like moleskine notebooks - or buy cheese from specific vendors because it broadcasts something about who they are. This statement can be personal/internal, shared with a small audience…”

The “small shop” concept is the feeling I got at Villandry in London - it was right in the heart of downtown, near the international embassy district, but instead of being generic, they were hyper-specialized. It was the kind of place you’d bring your aunts and uncles who were visiting town, to show off the awesome places that can grown up in your backyard, and they’d sit back and go “I would never buy anything in here, but I’m in awe of the place.” That’s how I feel at Stardust, that’s likely how some folks feel in the front room at Dandelion Communitea, or the co-op area at Infusion Tea in College Park. What does it all mean? How did these people come to create this art, or this custom stationery, or eco-friendly teacups, or press their own olive oil? Why are there hundreds of movies I’ve never heard of, and how in the hell can they organize them by country and director instead of genre? Who does that?

Boutiques do that. The perfect local bookstore would do that.

Villandry Villandry

Take a look at people who use open source software, you’ll find the same aesthetic. Hand-made, personalized, specific, and powerful in the hands of a well-informed user, but you don’t need to be the guy who wrote it to use it or change it. You think there should be a French translation? That’s up to you. A sixth checkbox? Hack it in, contribute it to the repository. Make this the best tool for you, and therefore the best tool for folks who know where to look.

I could go on all night. Maybe I’ll go on this weekend at BarCamp. But I don’t title it “indy bookstore”. What is it?

jQuery broken in Internet Explorer? Put your $(document).ready at the bottom! March 19, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, HowTo, Coworking, Web Sites, Programming, javascript, jquery , add a comment

Tonight at Cup-O-Code, David, Gabe and myself were troubleshooting a little issue with the product page javascript that Gabe uses to update the price as customers select various options. The code wasn’t working in Internet Explorer, but since jQuery should be browser agnostic, we had to go back to the drawing board. After David re-wrote my first draft of the code we’ve got there, we got the function back to a working state in Firefox, but IE was still eluding us, but not really.

We were actually trying to make the script work on two instances of an online store, Futon Planet (FP) and Futons, Etc. (FE). The first site’s product page was giving us no Internet Explorer trouble, but the second was behaving very strangely. Then we noticed that FE’s javascript wasn’t finding returning anything at all.

We used this code to help us debug and see if jQuery could find the value in question:
alert($("adjustedPrice").length());

Which returned a blank pop-up, when it should have been returning “$0.00″ instead. The script didn’t seem to be finding the value, and when the alert showed up, it was actually drawing the alert before you could actually see the rest of the page.

Apparently IE6 executes $(document).ready() at a different time or in a different fashion than Firefox, and once the javascript faults out it just stops everything.

We moved our $(document).ready() action to the bottom of the page, and everything was just fine after that.

Mission accomplished.

How to add subtitles to video podcasts March 2, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Podcasts, HowTo, Video, mashups, interface, flash, Web Services , 2 comments

At BarCampMiami, one of the folks in my podcast session had a question about creating a multi-lingual podcast. I instantly suggested that photocasting with something like SlideFlickr and including an audio file would be simplest and very shareable. Visuals certainly have the power to transcend the barriers of language (if not culture). Still, she was hoping for a more flexible answer, like subtitling videos.

I had certainly seen Rocketboom and other vlogs include subtitles and have mutli-language support, but I was skeptical about finding a cross-platform tool that could get the job done.

I did some searching and found out Google Video supports subtitles if you’ve already made the file - OK, but how do I make one? Linux has lots of tools available, but I don’t think that will help my friend in this case. Jubler - Cross-platform subtitle editor in Java Then I started finding the web-based subtitle solutions via del.icio.us, and at the bottom of page 3 hit paydirt. There was a compelling cross-platform downloadable tool in Java (cross-platform), but I had trouble getting video playback to work on my mac. I could see the video frames alright, but for moving pictures Jubler was no help. It required MPlayer to work, which I have, but something wasn’t right, so I gave up and went to the web.

Next on my past-tense journey was subtitle.in, the best subtitler of the bunch (I also tried a tool that required use of Google Video and wouldn’t allow YouTubage). I have two complaints about subtitle.in:

Add subtitles to video podcasts

After some playing around, I noticed you could move the start time of the subtitle by half-a-second, but the controls for this were unintuitive at best. Try to see if you understand from this image. Me either. They’re under the list of titles and say “< Prev 0.5 sec" and "Forward 0.5 sec >“. Since I figured out that the “Delete” key removed the currently selected title, this was a logical next step, but I don’t know why we couldn’t just type in the time. My anal self needs that level of granularity.

Time appears to be broken into 100-frames per second? Not sure how that works, but the titles seemed to play back fine.

Tip: Type out all of your titles before you get them in this tool or any other subtitling utility, and make notes about when each phrase starts, with a minute:second attached; this will go much more quickly for you. If you’re like my friend and you want to translate the video into 4 languages (English, Spanish, French, Portuguese), keeping your notes and times straight will be a huge boost in throughput.

Check out a sample video at subtitle.in - as of this writing, I only did 3 screens of subtitles, so don’t go looking for anything past the first blackout.

iPhone Web Clip Favicon Fun! January 28, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Links, HowTo, Drupal, Browsers, Trends, Design, Web Sites, interface, Branding, phone, Petentials , 1 comment so far

If you have a web page of any kind - blog, business, social network, whatever - take 3 minutes out of your day and hook this up.

Everyone has a fun little 16×16 favicon to sit in the bookmarks section, links bar, or tabs of their favorite browser (Flock, Songbird and Firefox come to mind). This has been a long-running tradition with webmasters and SEO companies to give you that last bit of branding: the favicon!

Now with mobile devices and desktop apps (rich internet applications, too?) getting into the mix, there is a need for favicons larger than squint. Enter, the apple-touch-icon and associated rel tag, which is even easier to implement than a favicon. No special file formats, no special programs needed. Instead of a screenshot of the web page, you now have a degree of control over a bookmarker’s (webclipper’s? that sounds nice) touchscreen.

All you have to do is name the thing apple-touch-icon.png and throw it in your document root. According to the primary vivid, it should be 57×57px, but that’s actually the rendered size and not likely the size Apple uses internally. If you go to http://apple.com/apple-touch-icon.png, theirs is a nice round 129×129, which is roughly 2 1/4 times larger than 57×57. I figure Apple must know something we don’t, so I’ll play along.

And now, a handy diagram to show you what’s up:

Favicon

Favicon
16×16

Apple Touch Icon

Apple-Touch-Icon
57×57

Apple’s Official Icon

Apple
129×129

Once you get your image loaded, borrow the boss’ iPhone and add the webclip to your home page. There is also a preview screen that lets you know instantly if your icon is working (not pictured).

Apple iPhone Logo

The iPhone even added a nice glossy, buttony finish to the experience. Ahhhhhh…! You’ll also notice the edges of your icon may get trimmed (which caused the boss to make a face). This is, as far as I know, normal. If you don’t want the boss to make a face, center the icon and leave some extra space around. Using the Apple example may be a helpful guide.

Last but not least, you may be wondering: “Why do I have to name my icon something so specific, and why do I have to use the document root?” Looks like you don’t. Again our friends at vjarmy.com tell us that there is a rel-tag we can throw in the header if we want to place the icon elsewhere:

<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/path/to/my-cool-icon.png" />

If you don’t want to use a .PNG, you have smelly feet, but if you’re OK with being known as the smelly foot man, by all means, don’t use the best web picture format. I also had to dissuade my boss from experimenting with transparency in the .PNG, because I’m quite afraid of the results. Imagine a person with a naked woman on their iPhone desktop; now imagine your company’s logo displayed distastefully close to (or on top of) an unmentionable portion of said woman’s body - with a transparent background! Yikes. I would feel very sorry for Six Apart on that day…

I find the apple-touch-icon tag to be a scoche proprietary for my taste, but so are iTunes tags in podcast RSS feeds, so I guess we must needs put up with a little bullcrap every now and then.

I also heard someone recently complain about sites that have a default iPhone interface, and I mostly agree. They should put the interface on a subdomain so you can get at the regular functionality of the site, but I believe a truly useful service should be user-friendly through multiple interfaces, and traditional web apps are not always suited to touch screens.

If you have any questions (or if I forgot something) buy all means, let me know.

I am also hoping to make a small and fun Drupal module that encourages you to upload a 129×129 image to use as your site’s official webclip instead of a screenshot, so be on the lookout for that. Would you like to see other iPhone-friendly features integrated, like style sheet includes, javascripts, etc? I’d love to know.

Drupal Easy January 23, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Site News, Career, Podcasts, HowTo, Drupal, Video, Liberatr, Web Sites, Facebook, Teaching, open source, Branding , add a comment

A while ago, Charlie and I were talking about how we could share our love of Drupal with the rest of the world. Our natural desires to create original content and extend the reach Cervo Systems helped us develop the idea for a website, a podcast and a community around making Drupal accessible to people with no knowledge of programming.

Welcome Drupal Easy to our family.

Today, I answered the first question on the site, about pathauto aliases and XML Sitemaps. I hope we keep getting some mid-level questions like this, but also some much simpler questions.

I have a screencast planned for the near future that compares Drupal against industry standards for security. This will hopefully be the sort of thing PHP haters and team leads will be able to use to understand that Drupal is awesome.

One day in the future, I’d also like to come up with a coherent set of lessons we can sell in a video book format.

I also have a Facebook page which currently has 8 random fans attached, and that’s actually how I got the first question.

I think this is going to be lots of fun, and maybe help us make a little cash once we get that part of it going. Who knows?

Coffee Pr0n with your morning Blogroll December 10, 2007

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Podcasts, Links, HowTo, Video, Coffee, TV , add a comment


Boing Boing TV is an utterly amazing show. Watch it. Daily.

Coffee aficionado Mark Frauenfelder demonstrates his favorite portable coffee maker, the Aeropress, and makes a delicious cup of methamphetamine-free espresso (Intelligentsia Coffee’s “Black Cat” variety, to be precise). While you’re enjoying that first cup, watch this mesmerizing gogo dancer, Miss Foxie Moxie.

Flock and Facebook Screencast November 21, 2007

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Podcasts, Music, HowTo, Video, Browsers, Trends, Web Sites, mashups, Facebook, interface, Teaching, Friends , add a comment


The new Flock is out and better than ever, so I’m inspired yet again to screencast about it and show you more about this browser. In this edition we talk about how Flock has integrated your Facebook friends (and Flickr, MySpace, YouTube) right into the sidebar. You can keep the People bar open while you surf the web and make updates to your status, write messages, subscribe to media and share with your friends with just a simple drag-and-drop. This is the version of Flock you’ve been waiting for, trust me.

Download the Screencast (iPhone friendly!)

If you want to see anything else demonstrated, like if you want to teach your boss how to upload YouTube videos, I would be happy to create something custom for you. We do dedications!

Use Yahoo Site Explorer to get Top 10 Pages for your Site

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Site News, Podcasts, SEO, Links, HowTo, Video, Trends, Wordpress, Web Sites, statistics, OrlandoScene, adsense , add a comment

A while back I installed an excellent plugin for Firefox called SearchStatus. In addition to showing me the pagerank and compete score of any page I visit (I think it does Alexa, but I have a different plugin for that), it also gives you this handy right-click menu with lots of neat stuff in it. Most useful was a list of all the pages that Google, MSN and Yahoo! index on your site. For this blog, the list is interesting, but I’m not trying to make a living being me, so I checked out OrlandoScene.TV, my up-and-coming video podcast.

From Google, most of the top pages were wordpress archive lists - not very interesting, but it does prove that older pages get more juice in Google. Here’s Google’s top 10 OSTV category pages:

  1. coffee
  2. podcasts
  3. relayforlife
  4. maitland
  5. austinscoffee
  6. pandos
  7. michelle
  8. theatre
  9. rogers
  10. loch haven park

Here’s Yahoo’s top 10 pages for OSTV:

  1. Orlando Scene TV
  2. OSTV on B & S Daily Market at Orlando Scene TV
  3. OSTV 03: Taste Restaurant at Orlando Scene TV
  4. OSTV Still Getting Started at Orlando Scene TV
  5. OSTV 01: Relay For Life Concert at Orlando Scene TV
  6. OSTV 02: Enzian FILMSLAM at Orlando Scene TV
  7. 2007 Orlando Fringe Festival at Orlando Scene TV
  8. Orlando Video Blog Kicks it Off at Orlando Scene TV
  9. orlandoscene.tv/feed
  10. 2007 archive at Orlando Scene TV

The MSN top 15 pages for OSTV (MSN was the only one with an RSS feed) were interesting as well. Kind of neat was every so often they would publish a date that specified the last time they indexed it (I think).

  1. Orlando Scene TV
  2. orlandoscene.tv
  3. orlandoscene.tv/feed
  4. orlandoscene.tv/comments/feed
  5. OSTV on B & S Daily Market …
  6. OSTV 01: Relay For Life …
  7. OSTV 03: Taste Restaurant …
  8. OSTV 02: Enzian FILMSLAM …
  9. Orlando Video Blog Kicks …
  10. Join us at E.L.L.A Music …
  11. Subscribe at Orlando …

I didn’t make those linkable because those are mostly in the yahoo list as well. It’s interesting to see where MSN puts pages vs. Yahoo! I don’t know how their algorithms differ, but it’s worth looking in to…? Also, MSN repeated the first result… why?

I think Google’s results are the least useful here (until I start optimizing and theming my category pages). For now, I have a neat wordpress plugin called Landing Pages that helps out by showing the user something like this:

orlando video coffee

You came here from www.google.com searching for orlando video coffee. These posts might be of interest:

* OSTV on B & S Daily Market
* Join us at E.L.L.A Music Festival
* OSTV 01: Relay For Life Concert

But I think each category - like coffee, theatre, etc. should have a graphic and some related posts like this. That’s also a great place to do some contextual advertising. I think I might throw adsense on my archive pages - especially since google thinks they’re so important.